Testicular Cancer

Did you ever pursue any complementary therapies?

Arthur Frank replies' I was all set to if orthodox medicine had ever failed to deliver what it said it was going to achieve at the time it was going to achieve it. I was certainly interested in other things. I think the real value, I mean testicular cancer treatment is just so successful in mainstream medicine that really I think someone would be crazy not to pursue mainstream treatment. Where I think complementary alternatives treatments can be very useful is controlling side effects and minimising the damage of chemotherapy, particularly nutritional treatments. But a lot of complementary alternative herbal treatments can have interactive effects with medical drugs and so it's important to find medical practitioners who are sympathetic to what you're trying to do and to be very clear about what other things you're taking, even herbals, because herbals are, to be effective they can't be that benign. So you've got to be clear on what the interaction effects are. I wish I had had greater possibility for things like massage therapy. Physiotherapy I think can really help during certain stages of chemotherapy. There are just a lot of adjunctive therapies and then as I say the big one is better nutritional counselling, that I had.
 

Everything I ate gave me problems. I couldn't work out what to eat, what not to eat, and you know all the usual things that give you indigestion did, and everything that they say 'eat', you know gave me indigestion as well, so it was a bit of a nightmare that was. 

So have you tried any other complementary therapies?

I tried acupuncture. This was where I basically got, where the dietary thing started off, of looking at how I eat. Because my GP was giving me these tablets, he was very good. He was the one who actually suggested I go for acupuncture. You know he said "Give it a go, it might work."

And where do they, what do they do for the acupuncture?

Well they inserted needles at points all over the body. Personally I don't think it worked, not for me, whether it does or not I really don't know.

How many sessions did you have?

Oh crickey I had 4 or 5, something like that. Well at '36 a session it's expensive. I was in a position where I could afford to have that done but a lot of people aren't. But the, it was a Chinese doctor, a Chinese practitioner who did this. But what he told me was more important than what he did. He was talking about what to eat, and that was what set me off on the, looking at how I could improve the situation.
 

It was also very important I think psychologically for me to look you know at my life style, look at my diet, I'm a single man with a good social life you know, I probably drink more than I possibly should for pure health reasons. So I mean I cut back on that, I cut back on my alcohol consumption. I, I started eating organic food, not with any great, the vague sort of you know idea that it was probably better for you, and there are all sorts of studies that I don't know anything about the validity of in terms of eating an organic diet, or at least eating as healthily as possible you know can be good for you and specifically if you're dealing with a disease like cancer. So it was important for me to take control as much as I could of those elements of my life, the ones I could control, you know my fitness, my diet, I even started taking some vitamin supplements and some sort of zinc supplements. And you know I'm not saying that that's something that's medically proven in any way, but its important for me psychologically to feel that I was actively doing something myself to make myself you know if not better, then at least as best prepared as I possibly could be for, for the treatment that was coming.
 

Do you mind explaining what hypnotherapy is like?

Yeah, well I started off by describing things that had, sat down with the lady and described the things that had gone on over the past you know 4 years, not only the cancer but other events that had happened you know deaths and you know divorces etc. etc. And I told her one of the main things that bothers me, that I've become anxious about is the, is the sweating issue and it bringing back all the memories. And the sort of thing that we do is we sit down and for probably three quarters of an hour she talks me into a relaxed state where I'm still in control of everything that I do but it's in effect getting through to your subconscious and relaxing you and teaching you things to do if you're becoming stressed. Then we talk through various images, relaxing images, laid by the beach etc and remembering to do this sort of thing and think about these things if you start to feel as though you're becoming a bit anxious and you find that you know it does relax you.

So if you start to sweat and you start to remember how you first found that you had cancer then you start, then you start to think of nice things, other images?

Yeah I just try and take a few deep breaths and relax a little bit and think of different things, things that you know make me feel happy as opposed to the things that remind me of what had happened previously.

And that's beginning to help is it?

Yeah it is yeah.